With Bloomberg news reporting this week that Goldman Sachs is cracking down on staff who aren’t in five days a week, we take a closer look at what some of the UK’s big banks are doing.

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs is understood to be looking at fresh ways to enforce its policy of working from the Office five days a week, as many employees are still reluctant to return to the office full time, reports Bloomberg news.

Goldmans Sachs has been contacted for comment.

In April, banking group JP Morgan Chase & Co. warned that bankers refusing to return to the office would be punished, with many employees still failing to hit the minimum office attendance target of 3 days a week. 

And US banking giant Citigroup Inc. said it will start holding employees “accountable” for compliance with Hybrid work model rules, checking they are complying with the requirement of working at least 3 days a week in the office.

“Working remotely is not an employee choice.”

Morgan Stanley’s CEO, James Gorman, has maintained a pro-office and anti-remote work stance for the last few years, famously saying “if you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office.”

He has since said: “Working remotely is not an employee choice.”

But as Wall Street cracks down on home working, kicking its reluctant laggards back to the office, we explore what some of the UK big banks are doing.

HSBC

HSBC has decided to leave its iconic headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf, with plans to relocate to a smaller office in central London, understood to be happening in late 2026. It is considering the central London location of BT’s old offices.

The move is seen as a blow to Canary Wharf’s iconic financial district, where HSBC has occupied a 45-floor skyscraper for more than two decades.

The banking group announced last year that it would be reducing global office space by around 40%, in response to new models of hybrid working, with its chief executive Noel Quinn saying five days in the office is “not necessary.”

As well as a location move, there are plans to change the office layout, with the leadership teams ditching personal offices, opting to work in a fully open-plan space with no designated desks instead.

Nationwide

Building society Nationwide announced a permanent hybrid working model in 2021 and this has continued to this day. 

The flexible workplace policy, ‘Work Anywhere,’ came after 57% of their employees said they wanted to work full-time from home and a further 36% said they wanted a blend of home and office work. 

Unlike the big banking firms, Nationwide is set-up as a building society or mutual, owned by its members. Members are anyone that banks, saves or has a mortgage with them. Nationwide says: “We’re run for their benefit and to help the communities around us. We’re not run for shareholders in the same way that banks are.”

“Our associates and our technology team have proven to us that we can serve our members and partners with extraordinary care and a large portion of our team working from home,” Nationwide’s CEO Kirt Walker has said.

Natwest

Natwest, which is part owned by the UK government, is a proud exponent of hybrid working, having adopted a hybrid approach since 2021. “I would say that we’ve busted the myth that jobs need to be done in a certain way,” NatWest chief executive, Alison Rose, told staff at the time.

Fast forward to 2023 and Natwest offers a range of remote-first and flexible work options, depending on the job role. It has a breakdown of the three areas on its Careers page: Remote first, Hybrid and Office first. 

In addition to these, it also offers flexible working which allows employees to work outside of standard working hours, if they have parent, carer, student responsibilities or just a busy lifestyle.

Bank of England

The Bank of England has had a hybrid workplace strategy since July 2021, with one day in the office and the rest at home. This followed a survey of Bank staff with the majority wanting to work from home at least two days per week. 

But the Bank has also spoken of the challenges of home working. In a speech in October 2020, its then chief economist, Andy Haldane cautioned that working from home too often risks dampening creativity and productivity.

Haldane said: “There is a balance to be struck between events which distract and events which fire the imagination. For me, the 0-5 model of home working strikes a balance in the wrong place, as with hindsight did my pre-pandemic 5-0 model.”

The Bank of England now has a hybrid working model permanently, which it offers to attract new recruits. 

Andrew Bailey, the bank’s governor, said: “As employers we are all having to face the fact that we are having to recruit people in a job market where that is increasingly part of the work-life balance.”

Will hybrid working last?

According to data from CIPD, three-quarters of employers now offer hybrid working but employers are split over whether it will last.

The survey of over 1000 senior decision makers by the CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, found that the majority of employers who can offer hybrid working – a mix of workplace and home working – are embracing it:

• More than three-quarters of respondents’ organisations (78%) allow hybrid working, through either formal or informal arrangements. Just 8% don’t, and 13% said it wasn’t generally applicable for their job or sector. 
• Over half of respondents (54%) expect hybrid workers to be in the office for a minimum number of days either each week (43%) or each month (12%). 
• Two fifths (44%) said there were no minimum expectations to come in. 
• Where staff are expected in the workplace each week, it’s typically for a minimum of two days (34%), or three days (32%).
• 59% of senior decision makers agreed business leaders and managers in their organisations were more likely to trust people to work from home and be productive following the pandemic, compared to before COVID-19. Just 13% disagreed.

While the research indicates that hybrid working is working well in many organisations, some challenges or resistance are being felt.

While most employers (68%) don’t plan to make any changes to pay and/or benefits for hybrid workers, 4% of respondents said their organisation had reduced pay and/or benefits and as many as one in ten (13%) said they plan to do so. 

There is also a risk that new ways of working may be short lived. A small majority of senior decision makers (42%) felt that ‘the memory of the pandemic will fade quite quickly and it won’t be long before we revert to the way we worked before COVID-19′. However, 41% disagreed with that statement.

US versus UK

The US appears to be more draconian in its enforcement of office working, with global shopping giant Amazon US leading tech companies in cracking down on working from home, by tracking and penalising those who do not spend enough time in the office.

However, the UK arm of the company is not following suit, a spokesman confirmed to a question from the Matt Haycox Daily.

When Amazon UK , which employs 75,000 people, was asked whether the operations here were going to follow the policy of its US parent company, a spokesperson said: “Nothing for the UK. This was very much a US only thing.”

As the dust settles post-Covid and some of the trends that surged during the pandemic slowly slip away, it will be interesting to see where hybrid and remote working settles in the future. Only time will tell.

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